The 2008 Australian study of remnant data contained on 2nd hand hard disks: the saga continues
This highlights a security risk for critical infrastructure providers and may require government intervention.
The study examined remnant data on second-hand enterprise hard drives purchased at auctions, finding a high rate of un-erased drives containing critical infrastructure information, with concerning results from a small sample size.
This study looked for remnant data on enterprise level hard drives that were purchased through auctions. The drives were analysed for information, be it topical or formatted. In the event that drives were formatted, forensic tools were used to recover this data. This years study revealed a high level of not simply un-erased drives, but drives which contained information that related to critical infrastructure providers. That such a small sample size yielded such a high rate of un-erased drives is of considerable concern, and it may be necessary for the government to become involved.